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Excuse me for not joining in with the paeans of praise.
Since the 'upgrade' I have been unable to post comments. Nor can I post blogs.
It all works on the computer at work, but not here on my laptop - where it all worked fine last week.
This is for me a retrograde step.
I cannot believe that I am the only one with this configuration of hard-, soft- and vapour-ware.
Furthermore, I have had today an eMail from a fellow author telling me that she is leaving BCTS as the new 'improved' BCTS now causes her too many problems in an already busy life. She doesn't want to waste hours every day trying to achieve what she wants.
This was not a good move, folks.
Comments
I've had problems too
posting & commenting but assumed it would eventually calm down, keep losing pictures. As soon as websites 'improve' I have problems using them.
Angharad
I can certainly understand...
Your need to vent. When things I've depended on suddenly stop working because of nothing I've done, I've always gotten really frustrated. That's what I read in your post there. Lots of frustration.
I'd love to help you. But you didn't include anything about your laptop setup at home. What OS are you running? What browser? There are several of us out here in the community who aren't bad with these thingies.
I'm also hoping that your friend was using a bit of hyperbole in that wasting hours every day to do something. There's nothing on this site that we as users can do that should take hours. I'm sorry, but there isn't. Okay, maybe if you're typing in a 10k+ word story from scratch off of the top of your head...
Right now, while Erin, Cat and Piper are tweaking and fixing things, I'm sure there are things that don't work exactly like we'd want. Or, not work at all because they're still being fixed. But it sounds like a lot of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Einstein's definition of insanity... (Hey, I'll freely admit I forget it myself and keep clicking at the screen sometimes going, "Work!")
I'm not completely happy with things. There is WAY too much pink for my taste. So, I'm hoping that we might eventually get a color palette in account options, or maybe some themes that aren't quite so... Pink. The commentng setup is a little awkward to me.
However, Erin and company have been hinting at these changes for awhile. And, I'm sure that a big part of them is to make it easier on their end for Admin purposes. Drupal 7 was supposed to be good for that. I'm positive that when the tweaking and fixing is done, things will be pretty much like they used to be, with a couple of differences here and there.
I guess what I'm saying is change can be good. Give it a chance. After all, if websites didn't try to improve... We'd all still be looking at the internet the way it was when AOL was dialup and everyone had those flashy neon websites at Geocities.
~And so it goes...
Nothing stays the same forever
And BC is built on a set of tools that, if the site admins want continued support for, they HAVE to upgrade with.
People complain every time something on the site changes, but the changes are always for the good in the long run. The alternative is a site with absolutely no supported database code, like FM, and everybody knows the problems they've faced because of that.
Share with Erin, Piper, and Cat what elements are causing you problems, and what your setup is. They can then either help you troubleshoot things, or it will help them find problems. But never complain about updates to the source code: the updates eventually make things easier on Erin and the gang, and complaining about the update as a whole does little other than make us all seem ungrateful for the hard work they put into the site.
Erin and the gang work hard to give us more than just "a place to read, write, and discuss transgender fiction." They try to give us a site with lots of customization options, utilities, and a semblance of aesthetic design that most sites like this forego completely. None of that comes easy, or without the occasional hiccup.
And, honestly, I feel little to no sympathy for an author who chooses to leave BC over the obviously overstated "hours" spent working with the site. I know of no other TG fiction site that offers nearly the number of formatting options BC does. Heck, I know of very few sites that openly support TG fiction (rather than simply "allowing" it) that even give authors control of posting their own stories at all. If an author just wants to have their stories available to read then a simple copy/paste into the text box is enough: if they want more complex formatting, which most other places won't give the option for AT ALL, then there are naturally some complications involved with that.
Again, net code changes. Standards change. Toolkits update and change. We're talking computers here, in all their wondrous and vexing variety, so whenever this happens there WILL be issues. If you want those issues fixed, though, the best way to do so is to offer constructive feedback to help Erin, Piper, and Cat find and fix the problems.
Simply complaining does nobody any good.
Melanie E.
PS: For what happens when sites refuse to evolve and make use of the tools available to them, look at places like Sapphire's, Crystal's, or again, FM. Of the three, Sapphire's hasn't seen a new story in, what, five years? Crystal quit the game for numerous reasons (the site NEEDING an overhaul being only one of them,) and FM is at any given time held together by duct tape, hack wizardry, and hope. BC manages to keep up with mostly modern netcode standards, as well as offering users blogs/forums/search/social options/direct control over their own material, AND stay about 80-95%-ish stable. There are PAY SITES without this kind of support.
Gradual improvement
Since the site came up again I've noticed some gradual improvement. There's not quite so much pink, for example. I can edit my account now. I've never had a probelm with posting or commenting... having said that, I haven't yet posted a story chapter since the reboot.
One thing I don't like is the typeface. I find it much harder to read than the previous version, and the line spacing could be reduced as well. (In fact, the typeface used for entering this comment seems to be better.)
Other than that I can only echo what others have said. Everything changes and we have to find some comfortable way to adapt. If you want the readership to help overcome your problems, you'll have to be more specific about what you have and what you actually see. "Unable to post" is somewhat vague, after all.
Penny
One good thing
I can now access 'my stories' page which means I can see at a glance the numbers of hits, kudos, comments and so on. In trying to understand my readers, this the best analytic evidence I can get. So thank you team for that.
Angharad